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Garden by the Sea by Mercè Rodoreda [Excerpt]

To celebrate Women in Translation Month, we're going to post excerpts from several of our forthcoming books, starting with the new Rodoreda title, Garden by the Sea. You can get 40% off this and ALL Open Letter titles written or translated by women by using the code WITMONTH at checkout on our website.  Garden by ...

Why Are Ebooks [Let’s Talk about Catalonia]

Just like with last week's post, I want to kick off this mini-survey of a couple Catalan titles with a chart of the presses who have brought out the most Catalan translations (according to the Translation Database): My first response is: Thank god I finally realized how easy it is to change the color on these charts! I ...

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Three Percent #133: From Catalonia to South Korea

After a bit of a hiatus, Chad and Tom are back to talk about Riffraff’s new location, break down Catalonian politics and the recent editorial gathering the Ramon Llull Institute put on in Barcelona, and somewhat pick apart this article about Deborah Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian. This week’s music is Day I ...

Private Life

In Josep Maria de Sagarra’s Private Life, a man harangues his friend about literature while walking through Barcelona at night: When a novel states a fact that ties into another fact and another and another, as the chain goes on the events begin to seem more and more extraordinary, and the characters take on a ...

Latest Review: "Life Embitters" by Josep Pla

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Christopher Iacono on Life Embitters by Josep Pla, translated by Peter Bush and published by Archipelago Books. Here’s the beginning of Chris’s review: Last year, NYRB Classics introduced English-language readers to Catalan writer Josep Pla with Peter ...

Life Embitters

Last year, NYRB Classics introduced English-language readers to Catalan writer Josep Pla with Peter Bush’s translation of The Gray Notebook. In that book, Pla wrote about life in Spain during an influenza outbreak soon after World War I, when he was a young law student and aspiring writer. Readers got to meet many of the ...

The Gray Notebook

Throughout his work The Gray Notebook, Josep Pla mentions many different authors, some of whom have inspired him to pick up a pen. One of them is Marcel Proust. Even though Pla normally prefers nonfiction, he lauds the French novelist as “the greatest realist writer of all time.” Proust resolves the childish ...